Flickering images from the past

The past is a very surreal country. Just going through old cine film taken at Handsworth Grammar School in 1967. It's so grainy and black and white that lunch hour in the quad looks more like newsreel footage of recreation time in a POW camp. 

School quad or POW camp?

Suddenly there's me in the back streets of Brum wearing a houndstooth jacket, a fez and looking at the world through a tennis racket.There's Lew firing a fishing net from a bow. Scenes of a schoolmate being ambushed and beaten up, the masters versus the boys football match - referee 'Bing' Crosby. Bing again secretly filmed teaching us, and behind him on the blackboard what looks like Arabic but is some weird equation.

Looking at the world through a tennis racket

A passing parade of other masters - 'Winky' Watson, Froggy Knight, Mary Barber, Browning,  World Cup Willy Watton, Ken Doney, 'Gobby' Gilbert - all of them on their way home after a hard day's teaching. An old-fashioned number 70 bus floats down Grove Lane followed by a white-haired old man on a bicycle, me zooming past on the back of Lawrence's scooter, Jimmy Hinks silhouetted in the door of the butcher's shop, and all those young, familar faces: 'Eggy' Eggington, Billy Jackson, Gary Mills, Alan 'Gilligan's Island' Griffiths, Grant, the only black face to be seen. 

The number 70 bus floats down Grove Lane

And spliced into all this are scenes from 'Rodan', a Japanese monster film featuring a giant flying lizard. Thousands of fleeing Japanese and me, 40 years younger and none the wiser. It makes you think.

Rodan, star of Japanese B-movies

Revenge of the Three Stooges

People have always tended to look down their nose at the Three Stooges. Larry, Curly and Moe were never exactly subtle and their comedy was pure slapstick which revolved around poking each other in the eye and handing out a good slap in the face.

Moe, Curly and Larry in typical slapstick action

I’ve always had a soft spot for them, mainly because of an afternoon spent in a cartoon cinema in London with my mate Dancin’ Jones and a fellow film student called Scouse Annie. After spending lunchtime in a pub downing a few pints of Fuller’s London Pride we were up for a good time and found it  in the rolling programme of cartoons and short films.  

As always, we found the RoadRunner  particularly funny but were in hysterics when the Three Stooges flickered onscreen in a grainy old black and white movie called ‘Fifi Blows Her Top’.  I can’t remember a thing about the film except laughing until the tears rolled down my face.

All of this was brought to mind when reading Denis Norden’s book ‘Clips from a Life’ in which he recalls that at an American auction in November 1993 a signed group photo of Larry, Curly and Moe went for $1,820 while a signed group photo of Presidents  Nixon, Ford and Carter fetched $275. Quite right too. The Stooges churned out 200 films - 190 of them shorts - during their prolific career and probably brought more fun and laughter into the world than any President.

Who writes this stuff?

There are several things I find annoying about daytime TV and they’re all to do with the commercials. There are too many of them and often they’re just plonked willy-nilly into the programmes without any thought whatsoever – sometimes in the middle of a scene.

But my other gripe concerns the sponsors of these programmes whose mini-movies pop up at the beginning and end of each over-long commercial break. There's a company called Furniture Village who sponsor a load of recycled TV on channels like ITV10 and their strapline is 'You're in safe hands'. What the hell has that got to do with selling furniture? They’re not offering healthcare or insurance. They sell armchairs. Why shouldn't you be in safe hands when buying a beige sofa? Unless you're buying it in downtown Kabul. 

Why shouldn't you be safe buying a coffee table?

 Another ridiculous strapline comes courtesy of Wickes, the DIY outlet, who proudly proclaim  'It's got our name on it'. Not ‘Great tools for every job’ or ‘We can help you fix that shelf’ – but ‘It’s got our name on it’. What's so reassuring about that? This must be a dependable high-powered chainsaw  – it’s got Wickes written on it.

As for Simply Health with ‘We can be bothered’ well I should hope so. If you couldn’t be bothered I wouldn’t get my health insurance from you. 

Valentine's Night

Having been in agony for 10 days with sciatica I am unable to do very little - even sleep. However, when I did manage to drift off last night - thanks to the pain killers kicking in- I had a very weird dream.


I was walking down the street when I bumped into 1950s heart throb singing star Dickie Valentine. I immediately asked for his autograph on behalf of my old mate Dancin' Jones whom I knew would appreciate such a keepsake.

Dickie Valentine wearing the same coat as
in my dream

Dickie seemed a bit put out at my request and became even more impatient when  I spent ages searching my rubbish-filled pockets for a pen and paper. Eventually, I dug out a really tatty bit of paper and a leaky biro and Dickie duly signed his name. The weirdest thing is, when I awoke I found a scrappy piece of paper on my duvet and on it was scrawled "To Dancin' with best wishes from Dickie". No, not really. That would be ridiculous. This isn't The Twilight Zone, you know.
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Welcome to the Palace Flophouse Grill

John Steinbeck

Finally watched the BBC4 programme on one of my favourite authors, John Steinbeck. It was good despite Melvyn Bragg who insisted on quoting from 'The Grapes of Wrath' and 'Cannery Row'. Big mistake. He sounded nothing like Henry Fonda - he was all nasal and South Bank Show.

Back in our carefree student days, my mate Dancin' Jones and I had several ambitions - including writing a hit musical about the plumbers of Balham - but chief among them was going to live with Mack and the Boys at their doss-house shack which they called the Palace Flophouse Grill. Nothing to do all day but laze around in the California sun, drinking cheap whisky and scavenging food from Lee Chong's grocery store. It's all in 'Cannery Row'. Here's the beginning:

Mack and the Boys

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses."

Now we need a decent documentary about Ernie Hemingway. He was once challenged to write a novel in 6 words and came up with "Baby shoes for sale. Never used."  So much for his tough, grizzled old git image. Of course writing all those Mills & Boon romances didn't help him any either.

Did either Stenibeck or Hemingway write the Great American Novel? Possibly. Melville's 'Moby Dick' is supposed to be up there as a contender but I must confess I've never read it. I only know the first line ("Pardon me, boy, is that the Chatanooga choo-choo?" Later a hit song for Glenn Miller not to mention his orchestra.) According to Seinfeld, the second time you read 'Moby Dick'  Ahab and the whale become great friends.

Art Pickles and his whistling yo-yo

Who today remembers world yo-yo champion Art Pickles who endorsed and recommended a breakthrough in yo-yo technnology - the first whistling yo-yo? I do for a kick-off, thanks to one of the best Christmas presents I received this year -  the best of the Eagle comic in the 1950s.

The book features an amazing array of adverts from the '50s including the unique whistling yo-yo (reduced from 3/- to 1/6d and personally autographed by Art) which was available when you bought Outspan oranges - although the connection between oranges and yo-yos escapes me. There was a coupon so maybe, in order to receive your whistling yo-yo, you had to send that in with some orange peel.

You could also buy Dan Dare raincoats (Dan was the pilot of the future for those of you who didn't know). These guaranteed that you would "look smart and keep warm all year round". One thing puzzles me. If Dan Dare was zooming around outer space why did he need a "Cravanette-proofed" gaberdine raincoat? Does it rain on Mars?

Dedicated followers of fashion could complement their raincoat with a Dan Dare tie. In one of the comic strips featuring the Pilot of the Future  it was predicted that by 1996 cricket would feature wickets with four stumps. Nice try, Dan but no cigar.

It all brought back memories of a rubber Dan Dare glove puppet which I had when I were a lad (hours of fun for everyone) It would probably be worth thousands now on the open market - the sort of thing that they clamour for on the Antiques Roadshow. Alas, it was chucked out along with all my Superman and Victor comics not to mention those Beano and Film Fun annuals. Mothers have a lot to answer for...

Talking bloody heads



Pete and Dud in action - pity the Heroes of Comedy programme didn't show more of them


Just watched a Heroes of Comedy TV programme about two of my favourite funny men, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Really infuriating.

All these so-called comedians I've never even heard of coming out with the most inane tripe. One of them said, "With 'Beyond the Fringe' people began to think, hey, comedy can be funny." What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Then four of these so-called "experts on comedy" were shown all repeating the famous line - "I've got nothing against your right leg" etc - from the One Leg Too Few sketch. Just saying it! The only intelligent person was Neil Innes who said "What do I know? I don't wear corduroy trousers and have a sociology degree."

And all the time you just wanted to see more than two seconds of Pete and Dud in action. Fat chance of that. I switched off in disgust. These talking head programmes really annoy me - cheap television at its most crass. They almost ruined the programme about Victoria Wood's TV career. Almost, but not quite. At least you had people who knew and had worked with her - plus lots of good, funny clips that had me laughing all over again.